Wednesday, May 8, 2013

The Years of Mithril and Lembas: A Campaign Seed

BUT I COULD ALSO RUN THIS...

The RPG Blog Carnival for May Continues, with the theme “Campaigns I’d Like to Run.” We’ve already gotten great entries with striking ideas (which
I plan to lift!). You can see links and notes on those in the comments section
of the original post. If you’d like to join in the carnival, just write up a
blog post or the like on the topic. When you have it up, put a link in the
comments of that post (or this one) or send me an email. At the end of the
month I’ll do a comprehensive round up of them. For my second post on the topic
I remain pretty conventional. Like many of the other writer-GMs I get
distracted by new ideas easily. This one came to me pretty much fully formed
and screaming to be run last week. I was in the local discount bookstore and
picked up a hardcover of The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson for
$3. The premise is an alt history where 99% of the population died in the Black
Death. Immediately that got the wheels turning for me.

THE YEARS OF MITHRIL AND LEMBAS

High Concept:
Explorers search through the ruins of a mysteriously vanished Empire in search
of fortune, fame, and secrets.

Think: Any
frontier exploration or strange place film- Oblivion,
Prometheus, or Valhalla Rising.
Also consider the series Life After
People. The concept explicitly borrows from Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel.

Premise: After decades of turmoil and internal struggle, the Empire of the Moon has finally
gathered itself together. Wars and strife divided it and cut it off from a role
in the greater affairs of the continent. The players have been tasked with
heading over the Great Waste to the Empire of the Dawn, once a distant but
valued trading partner. Others have been sent to renew contacts and trade, but
none have returned. Most importantly, the party must retrieve The Relic, sent
generations ago to the neighboring lands for safekeeping. The trek across the
Waste is only a prologue to the challenges they face. They find the Empire of
the Dawn emptied and abandoned. What has done this? Who has survived? What
threat does this land bear? Can they make their way across this strange, wild,
and abandoned land to recover the relic vital to their homeland?

Scattered Thoughts:

This frame lends itself to a lot of combat, exploration, and
skill challenges. It could be done completely as a Hex-Crawl type adventure-
with some actual rationale about why the party has no idea about what might be
over the next ridge. As a GM, I could have a set of crafted events which might
offer insight or clues for the central quest. The rest could be randomly generated.
Ideally for something like this I’d put an emphasis on survival and living off
the land. Classic D&D borrowed an element of that from Outdoor Survival. This also echoes Source of the Nile a little. I
understand that the recent The One Ring
rpg puts an emphasis on this kind of game play. Travel as a key element.

In some ways this could also be seen as a massive, abstract
dungeon crawl. Imagine the abandoned cities- temples, palaces, and shrines
emptied and abandoned. I actually get a more sword & sorcery vibe from
that. Imagine a Conan-style game…where the players raid through these
mysterious and fallen places. They could be actually from a tribe which has
been out of contact with the “civilized” lands for some time. The players are
sent on a pilgrimage to retrieve something, perhaps a totem of their people
sent to the head of a pseudo-Roman Empire. Or you could do it fully historic-
imagine a Cthulhu Invictus campaign where the PCs are Germananic Barbarians or
Tribesmen from even further north. They’re sent to Rome to find something. When
they actually reach the Roman Empire, they find it emptied. Eventually they discover
that a Lovecraftian apocalypse has swallowed everything and everyone. That
would be pretty dark; not necessarily what I want to run.My preference, and that of my players generally, is a
balance between action and interactions. I like my NPCs. In some ways this
turns on there not being NPCs- that feeling of isolation. The PC have to depend
on themselves. Originally I thought they could have various other characters
with them, but I think that detracts from the atmosphere. At least in the
beginning of the game it needs to be the players alone against the wild. Once they
do meet people they shouldn’t have their questions answered. Perhaps the
natives have been changed or can’t communicate in the same way. But that doesn’t
really solve the problem. A more interesting approach would be for the group-
after many sessions of exploration- to come upon what appears to be a living
settlement. When they enter, they find it isn’t actually populated by people
form here. Instead they’re refugees from their own Empire who fled here several
years ago during the civil war. That could create some political tensions. Once
that’s solved, however, the city they find could serve as a decent base of
operations.Alternately, they find a non-human enclave- Elves, Dwarves,
or such. Isolated during whatever happened, they’ve begun to expand? Or perhaps
they’re simply just scouting. They could be played as a suspicious group-
fearful that humanity unleashed something terrible on the world and might bring
it again to their doorstop. Alternately, there could be suspicions that this group
had a hand in the destruction.

There’s always an extra challenge when you have a central mystery
to a campaign set-up. You have to figure out what you do when the reveals come
about. Not that you have to map or plot out those bits to the story. But you
have to think about the consequences for the players and their goals. For
example, in the set up above, consider what the actual goals of the group are:
to find the McGuffin item and return with it. However, once they hit the
emptied empire, it may seem more like their goal is to figure out how this
happened. That should probably be more secondary- a theme running through their
explorations. So what happens when they do figure out how this land was
emptied? Ideally that should reveal something about a threat. The PCs will be
smart enough to realize any threat of this magnitude isn’t so much about
themselves, but could also destroy their own Empire.

Which brings us to the question of the threat. A plague’s
classic, and if I weren’t doing a crunchy, low-fantasy campaign that would
probably be the way I’d go. What the PCs face is what remains in the aftermath-
starving animals, decayed infrastructure, monsters free to roam without threat,
old wards left to decay, and probably ghosts. I have a vision of a ghostly
empire emerging. But plague offers only abstract foes, disease and survival-
ones they can’t directly confront. What’s more useful, and yet more obvious, would
be some kind of monster or horde. Perhaps it has been halted or held in check,
but now those barriers are weakening. So PCs discover threat as one reveal, and
then discover more details about it as a second threat. Even better would be if
I could figure out something even more interesting- a dimensional rift, people
transformed, I’m not sure.

There’s another approach to this campaign which extends the
premise. In this case, the campaign is broken into several chapters, each with
a different group of PCs. There would be a significant gap in years between the
campaigns. The first has the players arriving and determining some facts about
the situation in the Empire of the Dawn. The second has them as later Scouts
sent to explore more distant corners of the emptied lands and uncovering more
secrets- rivals, a new race, a surviving enclave. The third has the PCs as part
of a colony group as the Empire of the Moon decides to seize some of those
lands. They face unfamiliar environments, old secrets, and perhaps rivals to
the claim. A running theme could be the threat which wiped out the Empire, the
discovery of strange magics, the relic- it could be interesting.

Thinking about it a little more, in some ways this is a
fantasy riff on Greg Christopher’s Cascade Failure. I think this is a little different, but some of the basic gaming
DNA remains. Switching it back- that does suggest to me that one way CF could
be played is as a space hex-crawl. This also feels a little bit like the
premise of Second City from L5R. However in that case the mystery of the
destruction is pretty much solved.